Old Virginia and Her Neighbours - v. 1 Author:John Fiske Volume: v. 1 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1897 Original Publisher: Houghton, Mifflin and Company Subjects: Virginia United States Maryland Slavery Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General... more » Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: Business affairs had not had time to recover from that severe strain. But Raleigh never lost sight of Virginia. Southey's accusation that he sent out colonists and then abandoned them was ill- considered. We have already seen why it proved impossible to send help to John White's colony. In the pursuit of his various interests the all - accomplished knight sometimes encountered strange vicissitudes. With all his flattery of the crowned coquette, Elizabeth Tudor, the true sovereign of his heart was one of the ladies of the court, the young and beautiful Elizabeth Throckmorton. To our prosaic modern minds the attitude of the great queen toward the favourite courtiers whom she could by no possibility dream of raising to the dignity of prince-consort seems incomprehensible. But after a due perusal of the English dramatists of the time, the romance of Sidney, the extravagances of Lyly, the poetry of Spenser and Ron- sard, or some of those tales of chivalry that turned good Don Quixote's brain, we are beguiled into the right sort of atmosphere for understanding it. For any of Elizabeth's counsellors or favourites to make love to any other lady was apt to call down some manifestation of displeasure, and in 1592 some circumstances connected with Raleigh's marriage ! led to his imprisonment in the Tower. But his evil star was not yet in the ascendant. Within a few weeks one of his captains, Christopher Newport, whom we shall meet again, brought into Dartmouth harbour the great Spanish carrack Madr...« less